The beginnings of neuroscience from the NYC perspective, with John Kubie (Downstate, NYC), including the early days of Downstate's Hippocampus Group (incl. Ranck, Muller, Kubie, Fenton), finding head direction cells with James Ranck and John's amazing career of work in memory and navigation since. Hippocampus research conversation. Slides can be seen at: https://loveandphilosophy.com/beyond-... Neuroscientist John Kubie and philosopher Andrea Hiott discuss the development of cognitive neuroscience, emphasizing the discovery of place cells and their critical role in spatial navigation and memory. It explores the conversations between various experts on their journey from psychology and biology to groundbreaking neuroscience discoveries. Topics include the intricate roles of place cells, head direction cells, grid cells, and border cells in the brain's navigation system, and how these discoveries have been crucial in understanding how animals, including humans, navigate and remember environments. The script also examines the dual-layer nature of memory, the hippocampus' function in memory consolidation, and the broader implications for understanding consciousness and self. Furthermore, it highlights the challenges in pioneering neuroscience, the impact of technological advancements, and explores the continuity between basic navigational instincts and complex cognitive processes, offering a comprehensive overview of the field's current state and its future directions. #hippocampus #neuroscience #history #downstate #johnkubie #andreahiott 00:42
The Journey into Neuroscience: From Snakes to Smell
02:55 Exploring the Vomeronasal System in Snakes
09:31 A Dive into Comparative Neuroanatomy and Early Discoveries
13:07 Advancements in Recording Techniques and the Evolution of Neuroscience
25:56 The Fascinating World of Place Cells and Cognitive Maps
32:36 The Cognitive Map Theory: A Revolutionary Idea in Neuroscience
36:45 Unraveling the Mystery of Place Cells and Remapping
38:23 Exploring the Significance of Context in Spatial Memory
39:21 The Intersection of Spatial and Episodic Memory
43:38 Discovering Head Direction Cells: A New Dimension of Navigation
52:05 Expanding the GPS of the Brain: Grid Cells and Beyond
01:04:49 The Technological Evolution of Studying Spatial Firing
01:12:08 Deeper Insights into Memory and Spatial Navigation
01:17:18 Exploring the Foundations of Memory and Place
01:18:59 The Evolutionary Perspective on Navigation and Memory
01:22:35 Path Integration: How Animals Navigate
01:30:56 Deliberation and Decision-Making in Animals
01:46:23 The Role of the Hippocampus in Memory and Navigation
01:53:23 Philosophical Reflections on Consciousness and Identity
Slides of images of cells discussed at: https://loveandphilosophy.com/beyond-...
Robert U. Muller—In memory by Kubie and Fenton: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
John's Blog: https://coronaradiata.net/about/
The golf piece: https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-s...
His writings on The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map: https://www.brainfacts.org/brain-anat...
Downstate: https://www.downstate.edu/faculty/cel...
Brain Facts: https://www.brainfacts.org/authorbiog...
A few of the papers: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jne... https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jne...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
If you want to go deeper and build philosophy together, please sign up for the Substack at https://communityphilosophy.substack....
Beyond Dichotomy started as research conversations & has expanded beyond my own academic pursuits towards noticing the patterns that connect across traditional divides. When I started my studies, there was so much I wanted to explore that I was told I shouldn't explore because it didn't fit into this or that discipline, but having studied & worked in so many fields, those barriers no longer made sense. The same felt true relative to passions & love. So I decided to open myself to all of it beyond traditional distinctions, towards learning and development. This podcast is where those voices gather together in one space as I try and notice the patterns that connect. It's part of my life work and research, and I would love to share it with you and I invite you to share your perspective and position.
TRANSCRIPT
Andrea Hiott: [00:00:00] Hello, John. It's so great to see you. Thank you so much for having this conversation today.
John Kubie: And thank you, Andrea, for inviting me. It's first we emailed back and forth, but the first time I've seen you live, I've seen your podcasts and
Andrea Hiott: yes, that's true. Patricia Churchland introduced us way back, but we are only finally getting to meet in person.
Although. I have read a lot of your papers over the years that I want to share with others, but let's just start with the biography. And, um, before we start, I also want to say we're going to talk about, um, some issues relative to neuroscience, but try to
talk about them in a way that's a little bit general and try to find ways to really think about and explain these topics, in a way that a lot of people will understand. So, but first John, I think it started with snakes and, um, smell. Is that right? Do I remember?
John Kubie: It's pretty early. That's not quite the start.
Andrea Hiott: Okay.
John Kubie: I mean, you know, I'm an older guy and when I was in college, neuroscience wasn't such a thing. And especially [00:01:00] we might call cognitive neuroscience was in infancy or Hadn't been born yet, but you know, it's exploded in recent years and I, in college, I was a biology major, but I was really interested in psychology.
I actually had a great uncle who was a psychiatrist who was very influential, but I didn't really know that there was any fusion of the two fields. And it was actually one year out of college that suddenly, aha. Brilliant. You know, you can do both a little bit. And, um, I started a graduate program. Do you remember
Andrea Hiott: what the aha was?
John Kubie: I was, I was working actually in a pediatric neurology clinic. Was it, you know, helping out? And I went, it took a part time, took one course, audited it by a professor in the program, Walter Riss, and it was called Comparative Neurology, and it was a comparative, description of brains.
And one of the things that excited me was that it was, um, it had a point of view. He presented, and I did science, you know, taught, but the point of view, that's [00:02:00] really great. It's exciting. And, he was really a brilliant guy. Very interesting lecturer. So that What
Andrea Hiott: was exciting about that? The point of view?
Did it mean you could The idea that it
John Kubie: wasn't just balancing all the facts. You could start with an idea and present, you know, defend it as strongly as you could, that kind of thing. And he had a few basic theses that he would present throughout his introductory course. One was levels of organization within the CNS that basically, you know, you had a theme and you could build them out in different animal brains.
Actually he was the original editor of Brain Behavior and Evolution. And so that was the, that's the core of the interest. So, when I started graduate school, it was in his group of faculty. It was in the Early 1970s when neuroanatomy and comparative neuroanatomy was, a much bigger component of neuroscience.
And, um, my advisor was in the group woman named Mimi [00:03:00] Halburn, and she was studying snake brain and she was at more of a psychologist and a, she was learning to be a neuroscientist and neuroanatomist and, um, in, she was in interested in studying the two olfactory systems in snakes. And just a year or two before, um, others in the group, Frank Scully and Sarah Winans had shown that the central connections of the main and the accessory olfactory bulbs in mammals had, didn't overlap and the accessory bulb is the relay for the vomeronasal system. So this really reopened the idea that these two olfactory systems had different functions. They weren't just redundant or overlapping in some way, which was sort of the propound idea. But, um, anyway, so
it turns out that snakes have a fantastically and relatively enlarged vomeronasal system. When they flick their tongues, what they're doing is picking up chemicals from the [00:04:00] environment and delivering it to their vomeronasal organs, which are in the roof of the, open into the roof of the mouth instead of into the nasal cavity.
The epithelium is very similar to the olfactory epithelium, but it's a second sensory system. And there was some rough idea that maybe this second system, this vomeronasal system is sensitive to non diabolicals and non airborne odorants. The tongue would be a good way of touching and picking them up and delivering them.
Oh, that's fascinating. I love going to
Andrea Hiott: natural history museums where you can actually see, for example,
I'm thinking of the dog because I have a dog that I just walked. And of course, the sense of smell is so prominent, um, the way that different creatures sense the world through their smell is really interesting.
Fascinating, but were you actually interested in that when you were young? Yes. Yeah. Okay. No, when I was young,
John Kubie: no, no. It all came through this, you know, starting graduate school and that when I started graduate school, I wasn't all sure that I, it could be a full-time scientist. Oh. The [00:05:00] idea of spending hours a day, 12, you know, full-time doing stuff.
I've done, been worked in labs and it wasn't, you know, co college. Laboratories would last two or three hours are excruciating , you know, outta school especially. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get at. What,
Andrea Hiott: What was it like driving the interest? Because you got very much into technology, for example. I mean, you're you're doing science, um, in the lab.
You're, you're good with the technology were you interested in that stuff when you were a kid or was it more curiosity?
I know you were interested in emotions at this time, at least I think I remember, correct. Well, mixed
John Kubie: things. So compared to my family, I'm very good with my hands and
Okay. But that's a bad comparison. I remember, in fact, science toys in the 50s were much better. But really great, I had a whole bunch of, they were, you know, not just totally microscopes and rectors sets and things like that.
I remember I had an analog computer set. I didn't quite know what it was, but I put it together, tried to get it to some math and things. Anyway, so, um, going in the emotion side probably is [00:06:00] similar to all of us. We're all a little mixed up and we want to know, you know, where that comes from, if we can fix that up a little bit.
And I did have a great uncle. Lawrence QB was a renowned psychiatrist. And he was the, you know, the sort of the famous person in our family. So,
Andrea Hiott: yeah, it
John Kubie: was, he was very motivated when I went to college and went to Johns Hopkins and he lived in just outside of Baltimore and I visited him a lot and he was really inspiring.
It's a lot of fun, but also, you know, it was sort of helped me focus a bit, but then not finally. But those are some of the influences. I
Andrea Hiott: can imagine that would be influential on, on different levels. I mean, when you hear your family talking about him as a famous man, that's influential. But also when you come to that age where you're, we all go through, whether it's adolescence or later, where you are, like, as you said, you, you feel a little confused.
You're trying to figure out the world. It seems like it would then kind of, yeah, that would fit naturally as a place to look maybe psychology. Um, if you had it already [00:07:00] in your, environment or context. Yeah,
John Kubie: and I was, I think I was introspective, so that, you know, fit in with that sort of things. I was, I would say that.
How does
Andrea Hiott: snakes and emotion and all of this come together? You know, at some point we go to the hippocampus, so this seems like these are far away, but were they?
John Kubie: Let me just, you know, be contrary in a little bit.
Andrea Hiott: Okay.
John Kubie: And you know, McLean's triune brain, is that familiar?
Andrea Hiott: I do, but we should talk about it.
The limbic and the
John Kubie: Yeah. So, Paul McQueen was an important historical figure in introducing actually the study of emotion into neuroscience and I think, you know, coined the phrase, the limbic system. Right. Which everyone says we
Andrea Hiott: shouldn't use anymore. I don't know how you feel about that.
John Kubie: I use it. Okay.
I use it in a way that's not very controversial. I say it's an anatomical system. It's defined by its relation to the hypothalamus and not in its functional.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
John Kubie: So, Paul McLean, the famous triune brain, and, [00:08:00] um, he's criticized for roughly saying there's a reptilian brain and then on top of that there's a proto mammalian brain and on top of that is a neo mammalian, as if these layers spring up from nowhere.
And every biologist, including Paul, knows that nothing comes from nowhere. Everything derives from something. And Paul McQueen knew that well. There's one just terrible figure that every, you know, That he used, everyone used, it seems to show these layers as if they just, one grew miraculously like, you know, from the head of Athena on top of another, and that's just silliness.
And he never really said that. And I've read his book, The Triune Brain, it's not a very good book, but his actual work was much, much better than that. And he had a pretty sophisticated. It's one of
Andrea Hiott: those things too that just went into popular culture as people talking about the lizard brain as if we've evolved from the lizard brain.
And you know, in the past five or six years, how emotions are made, the book has come out and it's kind of saying, okay, that's a really wrong way to think about emotions. And so I
John Kubie: think that's a really [00:09:00] wrong way. I think we did evolve from something like an ancestor to lizards, and we can, we don't understand it very well, but that's a real wonderful problem to explore.
Andrea Hiott: Well, you studied salamanders and snakes, so you probably see a different connection than I'm able to really see. I mean, are you, do you see some kind of continuity in a more general sense?
John Kubie: Yes and no.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. That's, I think
John Kubie: the biggest. Unknown in, well, let's back off a little bit.
So, um, there's a wonderful book came out a couple of years strider and Northcott called, um, it's a, it's the title, but it's the evolution of the vertebrate brain, and they're principally comparative neuroanatomists and very detailed comparative neuroanatomy. with some jumps into function. They're not great in physiology.
It's such a, it's an example of such a broad area that nobody can know everything. It's a very good book. But among all the [00:10:00] books, the big mystery is how, where neocortex comes from. Because neocortex, we all know, is really important. And its roots are not agreed upon, and even if they were agreed upon, if we know, let's say it came from dorsal cortex, it's almost certainly functionally very different from dorsal.
It's doing, you know, the algorithms, whatever it's doing is really unique and different. And so we, I don't think there is a great idea. where this wonderful neocortex came from. And connected to that is, well, this wonderful thing evolved. What's it doing for us? What's, what benefits do mammals have that have a neocortex that reptiles don't have and birds have another version of something that does something sort of like neocortex, but it's not a neocortex.
These are really interesting questions and you have to get into the functional processing level, which is just beginning to be understood to get at that. And I think that's [00:11:00] a really wonderful approach, avenue to get at that's barely scratched the surface.
Andrea Hiott: Might be a good place for people going into.
John Kubie: Yes, there are a couple labs working in that area, just a couple. And I'm not, the name's not coming to mind, but it's a very rich, I think, a rich, I mean, it's, you know, the rewards are, huge discoveries. So
Andrea Hiott: when you were working, um, with the snakes and smell, were you already, how are you, what were you working with?
What was like the kind of technology or the equipment or the procedures, methods?
John Kubie: One of the problems with my thesis work was, I love my thesis work. Your
Andrea Hiott: PhD was on that.
John Kubie: Yeah. Seven papers came out of it. There's really, It's one of the things where we simply answer, ask questions and answer them. They don't have to be investigated again, because it was such a new field.
You could just say, you know, is the vomeronasal system critical for mating behavior in male garbage snakes? The answer is yes. It's an all or none. It's not like. Oh, that sounds so satisfying.
Andrea Hiott: Rarely do you get such [00:12:00] satisfaction in science so quickly.
John Kubie: And, um, we did develop some novel techniques, but they're on behavioral lines.
So there was many was very good at doing the surgery and cut very carefully cutting the olfactory of the bone nasal nerves. We had great histology to verify the lesions and we worked in understanding histology and degeneration of the organ systems. I developed a technique suturing closed the bone nasal duct.
So the animals couldn't deliver tongue flick And , we anesthetized the local anesthesia, um, injections under the chin. So, so post paralysis of the tongue muscles and they couldn't flick their tongues. As soon as that returned, all the behavior, the moment it returned, the behavior returned.
And so a lot of, you know, video analysis of tongue flicking sort of permitted, but And there was very little background to work with, we were free to develop rude but interesting [00:13:00] techniques and it was a lot of fun. Fascinating
Andrea Hiott: PhD, but then your postdoc was
John Kubie: Well, so It was fascinating, but I didn't learn anything.
Deep skills that I knew I wanted to work in the limbic system. I think I wanted to work in mammals.
I wanted to do electrophysiology, and I had no idea how to do electrophysiology. So the first postdoc I did was at Pan with a guy named David Molton recording directly from the olfactory at Epithelium.
So, using electrical recording technology, well, the neurons in the brain use electricity. The signals they send from one neuron to another are electrical signals.
Action potentials are in the other signals. And so with electrodes of various sorts, you can put the electrodes either in a gross area and get gross waves like EEGs and field potentials, or with a fine tipped electrode, you can record, say outside a single neuron and listen to the activity of that single neuron, action potentials go [00:14:00] pop, or same thing I haven't done, you can use even a finer tipped electrode and go, poof, into the cell.
And record the electrical activity within the cell that leads to the cell having an action potential or not. That is the, you can listen to its inputs and see how they add together. And so there are a whole variety of ways of using electrical recording techniques to probe the brain. And, yeah. Was that all,
Andrea Hiott: That was all being developed, right?
As you were going to school? Yeah, this
John Kubie: is right. So 1977, I went to, to work at Penn. Late
Andrea Hiott: seventies then. Okay. But I was
John Kubie: not, This was not new. I'll get to what's new. So I was just, the recording from the olfactory epithelium and sand cell meters was relatively straightforward, simple things.
We're recording what's called an electro olfactogram, which is putting the electrodes on the mucus layer of the epithelium and recording a mass response of many [00:15:00] neurons when an odor is delivered. These are pretty big responses. And, um, the salamanders, you know, we just exposed the epithelium and we made, were able to make maps of sensitivity in different parts of the epithelium.
And when you say
Andrea Hiott: maps, you could sort,
John Kubie: well say the anterior part of the epithelium. The neuron, the set of neurons there was more sensitive to, to to water soluble odorants. And the posterior regions to less soluble odorants. And we mapped out different odorants in there, you know, where they would have a peak electoral factor grants and the generalization was that.
So that's what I meant by a map. It wasn't a map in terms of hippocampal maps or navigates. But as I said earlier, I really wanted to get into the brain, into this emotional stuff, into cognition, which we may get back to.
And this was not cognition, but it taught me a lot. So, in terms of new techniques, So I went back to my Ph. [00:16:00] D. school, down to medical school, where I am now. And Jim Ronk had just moved there from the University of Michigan.
And we'll go into Jim, I think, in some detail, I hope. Yeah, this is,
Andrea Hiott: so now we're at late 70s, right? This is 79. This is your second post doc. And you've got, now you've got the experience recording a bit.
John Kubie: And now you
Andrea Hiott: go to downstate for the first time,
John Kubie: right? And I had planned to go back and work with Jim. He was an exciting guy.
And among the exciting thing that he did was be on the forefront of being able to record single neurons. in behaving animals. So we go back to that electrical recording technique. There's a pretty small electrodes put into the rat's brain, right? And it's not going into a cell. It's getting close to a cell so it can listen to the activity of single cell, hopefully single cells.
So this was technically very challenging.
Andrea Hiott: So you're listening to the action [00:17:00] potentials. Right,
John Kubie: but so it turns out that Jim wrong and John O'Keefe were two of the pioneers in being able to record single neurons in behave while the animals walking around space. So
Andrea Hiott: O'Keefe was at McGill. We kind of already talked about him a little bit with Lynn, and he was just starting to use the same technology that you were using with Ronk at the same time.
Is that fair? Yes and
John Kubie: no. He was at University College London. He'd left McGill.
Andrea Hiott: Oh yeah, right.
John Kubie: He was already at UCL,
and he was recording from the hippocampus, and Jim was recording from the hippocampus. They didn't know each other. They were the technique, the important technical advance was to use something called the fe, FET or a field effect transistor, which put a lot of, um, up the signal going up the recording cable.
Now, the action potentials of single neurons are just tiny amounts of electricity.
Andrea Hiott: And
John Kubie: if you tried to put that tiny amount of electricity up a wire, [00:18:00] any movement of the wire would make huge art defense. Induce currents. And so you, so the problem of behaving animals, it's gonna walk around.
You've got a wire going towards a brain, and you got this crazy noise coming in.
Andrea Hiott: But
John Kubie: The FETs mounted on the head stage, amplified the signal so that the electricity going up that wire was much stronger Oh. And meant that the relative, um. Electricity induced by moving the wire was really small and could pretty much be ignored.
So, Jim and O'Keefe were among the pioneers, maybe the pioneers, in the ability to record, um, single cells in bathing animals, and these FETs were brand new, but they were robust enough to permit this, and they were good enough engineers to see the possibility.
Andrea Hiott: And did you know that Jim Ronk was doing this already, or?
Yes. Okay, so that's why you went there. You wanted to be part of that. Okay. Right.
John Kubie: And I'd heard from Jim, I think, about this, these things called [00:19:00] plate cells, that cells fired where the animals wasn't in a plate. So
Andrea Hiott: is this already the 80s then? Because that wasn't that 78 that he found those? No,
John Kubie: this is 79.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, so you were really on top of, you were like already reading all of this. Right.
John Kubie: Reading, I don't know. So, I heard from Jim. Word of mouth.
Jim and O'Keefe were working in parallel. They didn't know each other. Um, which, as Jim says, he heard about O'Keefe and he wrote him into, can I come over and see what you're doing?
Andrea Hiott: Right.
John Kubie: And he spent part of sabbatical over there, got to know O'Keefe and Lynn. And I, as I remember, he didn't see any play cells because they weren't recording stuff in the months he was there, but he was very, you know, he was very, he loved, he liked them a lot. I don't think he was 100, he was not a hundred percent convinced, but he was on their side.
And, because he hadn't actually
Andrea Hiott: seen them, but he, so he had not recorded head direction cells yet.
John Kubie: He had, no, he had, he was recording single neurons and he has a paper, Of the behavioral correlates of [00:20:00] single neurons, which goes totally different directions. He was not looking at he was not paying much attention to where the animal was.
These things called approach consummate cells or approach he and he'll deny that they're meaningful at all, because he just thinks he got it wrong. Although linen in general, keep a much more charitable and Yeah, I've
Andrea Hiott: noticed that. I mean, a lot of, it seems like he, this time period at downstate him and then you, and then Mueller will get into it.
Um, seems very important, but when Ronk is asked about it, he seems to kind of give credit away. Is there a reason for that? I mean, we haven't gotten into head direction. So I think it's
John Kubie: very important, but I don't think that I don't think that he would say it had anything to do with the discovery of place cells.
Andrea Hiott: So, yes,
John Kubie: he. Mod, he thinks O'Keefe's wonderful. He gives him, you know, full credit. I think in the beginning, in the introduction to the Cognitive Map book, they say Jim sort of saw the same thing. Jim denies it. That kind of thing.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I remember that part.
John Kubie: So they're a mutual admiration society, [00:21:00] that kind of thing.
Andrea Hiott: Well, that's fascinating. Okay. And,
John Kubie: So I
Andrea Hiott: So you went to work with him and he put you to work on this three behavior test that's something sort of similar, right?
John Kubie: Yeah, so in those days, Jim wrote, I think, a 200 page grant proposal, and it was all about history behavior, and he sent it to me. It was, you know, just stuff pasted together.
It was crazy. It was, but it was about the three, that's what people did in those days, and if you sent me 300 pages, you got funded, I guess. Um, who had the patience to read it? But if it was nobody wants to
Andrea Hiott: read it, so just give him the money
John Kubie: behavior test and the three behaviors he chose were, um, the radio alarm maze, which was developed by game David Alton, and it was very, he was used early on for lesions and navigation spatial behavior used a lot.
Very good. Um,
Andrea Hiott: sort of before the water maze. Yeah, it was the
John Kubie: chief test it, but before the water mazes. [00:22:00] Developed
Andrea Hiott: Richard Morris, who also come on the show and talk about everything, too,
John Kubie: right? And the second apparatus was a large maternal box, very big. And he, with his mother rats who were in the reason for that is that it was reported and true that, um, mother rats.
will have a difficult time retrieving their pups after hippocampal lesion. They'll retrieve them, but they won't put them back in the nest. They'll pick them up somewhere, put them back somewhere else, that kind of thing. And that's very
Andrea Hiott: sad.
John Kubie: And, um, I think they did, perhaps didn't dine in. They were still well into
Andrea Hiott: it.
Anyway, my personal feelings in check.
John Kubie: Okay. And the third thing was something called the DRL 16 and a different DRL is differential reward for low rates of responding. And it meant the animal had to press a bar and wait 16 seconds before it's pressing again. And then if it waited the full 16 seconds, it would get a reward [00:23:00] and build human built lovely Skinner box, actually two different arms could be activated and DRL 16s also were reported to be sensitive to hippocampal damage.
So it, these are three very different kinds of behaviors. Maybe we'll see things uniting these three behaviors. That will tell us more about the hippocampus.
Andrea Hiott: And for people who have no idea what you just said, because that was hard, the idea was the hippocampal lesions would affect each behavior selected, is that the selected behavior, or what was kind of the big idea of the proposal?
The lesion
John Kubie: literature showed that damage to the hippocampus disrupted all three of these streams. There was no mechanistic idea of what would combine the three things.
Andrea Hiott: It was
John Kubie: just, well, let's take a broad view and take a look at what happens. Do single neurons tell us anything about the relationships of these three tests?
And there was no recording that I knew, I know of or anything, but there was, there were [00:24:00] recordings on the radial arm maze, but not the other two. So what would you see in single neuron recordings in the other two? So it was just, Exploratory.
Andrea Hiott: So, you were the one doing the actual work. And so, I came to the lab and he says, he put me
John Kubie: this big, you know, this 200 page grant.
He put me on it. He said, ah, you know, you do it now, I'll, that's your job. And I was learning all these, you know, how to make the electrodes and the core. Which is exactly
Andrea Hiott: what you wanted, right? I mean, you got it.
John Kubie: So, you didn't really
Andrea Hiott: choose the hippocampus, but you chose more the method. Oh,
John Kubie: the idea, I think my idea was I would learn the techniques in the hippocampus and then move to emotion.
Yeah. The amygdala, wherever the emotion nexus is going to be. That was very It's funny
Andrea Hiott: because I think O'Keefe was doing something with the amygdala, right? And then accidentally found out
John Kubie: what he I mean, from your talk with Lynn, I got a sense of what Lynn found out about the hippocampus and emotion, or not
Andrea Hiott: emotion.
John Kubie: But things [00:25:00] but never knew it. So, I was put in this 3 things and it was a lot of work to get them all working. Most of the tasks have been built. The recordings were pretty sophisticated.
We recorded everything on videotape. With the behavior on videotape. Oh, wow. Yeah. So you still, you
Andrea Hiott: had a whole video archive of that. Wow. Yeah. I guess you still do, right? The spikes were on
John Kubie: the, I'd love to know where they all are, but I'm not 100 percent sure. So the spikes were on the audio channel, so they were well recorded.
In principle, we could go back and analyze it, but we'd never really figured out, once we'd collected the data. Now we're going to analyze it. Gosh, somebody should look
Andrea Hiott: at that again. I won't go off on that tangent, but there could be a lot there. But so you're recording neurons in the hippocampus.
John Kubie: In these three tasks.
Andrea Hiott: In these three tasks, which are different according to what's lesioned, right?
John Kubie: Yeah, they all get messed up with hippocampal damage. So the idea
Andrea Hiott: is
John Kubie: What did you find? So what we found was place cells, and place cells. [00:26:00]
Andrea Hiott: Wow.
John Kubie: That's the only thing we found. Um, in all three And can you For
Andrea Hiott: someone who doesn't know what that means, what does it mean that you found place cells, place So,
John Kubie: what a place cell is, it's a single, again, we're recording from single neurons in the hippocampus.
We're just listening to the firing of the cell. So action potentials
Andrea Hiott: in the cells, you hear it, it's almost just like, you're just hearing little Yeah. Tiger counter kind of noises.
John Kubie: Yes, just like a giger counter. That's a good analogy. So, um, and I'll use that in a moment. I think I got that
Andrea Hiott: from you actually.
John Kubie: And so the, um, but ideally the recording has no effect on the animal's behavior.
It doesn't care. It's got some, it does probably shouldn't care that there's something sticking out of its head connection to a cable and stuff. It's just running around. In fact, the behavior. We subsequently used, well, in these three tasks, the animal was motivated for different things. In the Skinner box, it was to getting food reward, and they would behave pretty well for that.
[00:27:00] In the maternal box, the mother was retrieving pups, in this case, normally, because it wasn't damaged hippocampus. In the radial arm maze, the animal had to solve a spatial problem of going down the hill. Each arm remembering which and find food at the end, remembering which arm had already been down until ideally sampling each of the eight arms before repeating anything.
And that's why it was a pretty good test. Now,
Andrea Hiott: had you read Tolman at this point?
John Kubie: Partially. Yeah, quickly. Yeah. So you were aware of this
Andrea Hiott: idea of a cognitive map and so on. And I guess that was right when Lynn and John were publishing their book? Yes,
John Kubie: Getting back to Lynn and John and, um, Jim Ronk, I think Lynn mentioned that they sent out copies of the book to many people.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, he does. And so
John Kubie: Jim had a copy that I read. That would be before I came to the lab.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, wow.
John Kubie: So you were one of
Andrea Hiott: the first readers.
John Kubie: I don't remember much about my reaction, but [00:28:00] Jim made lots of notes and sent it back to them and stuff.
Andrea Hiott: Is Jim interested in philosophy at all, in all of these kind of bigger ideas or, yes.
Yeah.
John Kubie: Jim's, you know, um, a human that's, you know, very broadly educated. Yeah. And I would go to Jim with questions about, especially history of religion. He's really good at philosophy. Wow. He was a philosophy major, I think, in college.
Jim's a mentor in many ways and just, you know, a great guy to talk to and just, you know, warm and giving and, you know, thoughtful and just, you know, a wonderful inspiration.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. People always say good things about him.
John Kubie: Yeah, that's true. Undeniable. Never heard of them. Um, too modest. So you got to
Andrea Hiott: work with them on your second postdoc, being one of the first people recording play cells in a way, right?
Yeah.
John Kubie: So what is a play cell? So, um, you're recording you, you've got this I'll describe it in a more current task where that's in, in a cylindrical enclosure and [00:29:00] we're dropping food pellets randomly on the floor. So the rat just maybe food, you know, just searching for food, doesn't know where to go.
And occasionally comes in little pellet needs it, but it's a task that just gets the animal moving. It doesn't have to know where it is in space. It's almost certainly not a navigational task, but while we're recording, We are keeping track of where the animal is. In more recent things, we have an overhead camera that automatically tracks the animal.
In these earlier things, we just did video. It was overhead and we tracked the animal. So, um, imagine that the center of a place field is a piece of radioactive material, and the cells are Geiger counters. So, what you hear is this pop, you know, this increased pops from this pseudo Geiger counter when it crosses.
the middle of a place field or a firing field. And so there is
Andrea Hiott: no, um, it's almost like there's one little area. If it can seem as if you're just watching it, there's some area on this in [00:30:00] this maze or in this area that the rat is where the cells fire only. You hear a lot of crackling and popping and then elsewhere, not so much.
So, you're watching an animal move through space, and when it's in a particular area of space, the cell that's being monitored will start making a lot of noise, and when it moves away, less noise. But there's, that's only one neuron, we have to remember.
Right. And
John Kubie: so, the process I was going through was collecting one, or sometimes two, neurons at a time with the Techniques as they were then, but it was, we were a lot of, these were out recording outside of the cells, the electric extracellular, there were a lot of technical challenges, like make sure you're getting the action, but the pops, the waveforms of one cell, not its neighbor.
That kind of thing.
Andrea Hiott: So this was the first time that someone was understanding what a place cell was. John O'Keefe was the first, um, to figure it out. What is it though?
Well, if you
John Kubie: were thinking from an information processing, it's a cell that tells you it was an outside person [00:31:00] or the rat where the animal is. That, the information potentially is giving to other parts of the rat brain or to you as an outside observer. And one cell.
And that's
Andrea Hiott: actually a bit different. So maybe it's working for the rat just immediately, right? The rat is, that's happening as the rat and we're modeling it and measuring it happen. But, um, this is just the beginning, right? So these cells were found, you're doing the experiments and this, there's many other GPS like cells.
John Kubie: It, we realized every. That we were recording one neuron out of tens of thousands,
Andrea Hiott: and
John Kubie: we imagined tens of thousands of place cells. Although we were recording one or two at a time. And initially what everyone found with Keith and us and others is that the cells would cover the accessible area of a, of an apparatus.
And that we at that stage couldn't record them all at once, but we could see that you couldn't predict one or the other. So [00:32:00] that was the cognitive map. Single cells are not a cognitive map, but a whole set. Which gives information to the rat, presumably, or to us. We'll signal where in the environment the animal is.
And
Andrea Hiott: yeah, and Tolman had kind of had this idea
John Kubie: that's
Andrea Hiott: something like that is happening in the brain, that there's some kind of metric or mapping of the space that is also kind of the knowledge for the rat, but we'll get into that, but this is the very beginning of it. So when you were doing this study, were you thinking, I mean, did you have any idea, like what were you just business as usual or were you really thinking like we're onto something very new?
Astounding
John Kubie: was Odell, Nadel and O'Keefe and Nadel's book, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Your publication was 78. What was 78? Yeah, it's astounding. Um, so it was based on not a lot of cells This pretty good sized book.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Is
John Kubie: written about a theory. It's, yeah, based on, I don't [00:33:00] know, 20 cells, something like that.
And they really put a stake in the ground, said, this is what we think it's doing. The title is the hippocampus As a cognitive map.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. What a brave thing to, to do. And
John Kubie: it was not universally well received.
Andrea Hiott: No, because no one had, I mean, this seemed a bit crazy. It still can seem very, kind of hard to get.
I don't know if you can get a grasp on, but at that time you had Tolman and then suddenly this area of the brain, which we should talk about that had in the fifties been kind of locked in with memory because of a person named Henry Malias and H. M. This hippocampal area, everyone just assumed was about memory.
So this was very weird that now. O'Keefe, and Rock, and you, and this little group of people, and then Lynn and Adele writing this book with this big title, um, this was not business as usual in neuroscience. Yes,
John Kubie: I mean, the book laid out a goal, a concept, which is still present, 50 years later, whatever, [00:34:00] it's still, based, you know, largely right, not right, but it's got the right ideas.
And there's still arguments about, is play special, and there's just an example of some Yeah, there are arguments, but basically the book is held up. There's a model. It was exciting. They put a model in, you know, modeling and it was a pretty terrible model, but it was a model.
You know, they came, tried to put how neurons would do this job. They only knew about, you know, very few neurons, not much was known. It was theta and place cells. That's all they put into their model. So, I think I say it in my second
Andrea Hiott: conversation with Lynn, I can't remember, but I do, in a way too, that book was, it wasn't the beginning of neuroscience, but putting all that stuff together, they start with philosophy.
You actually wrote a great article about that book, which I'm going to link to, where you kind of summarize it a bit. And I can also link to the book, but. I mean, they, as you're saying, they really, they have the model, they have the philosophy, they have the physiology, they're, [00:35:00] it's none of it's exactly perfect or right, but it's setting forth this kind of orientation of trying to think about these subjects in a bigger way.
But were you doing that? I mean, were you reading that book thinking that way?
John Kubie: Yeah, I think, I don't remember. You don't remember? I think so. Yeah. Not, you know. Well, if
Andrea Hiott: you were with Ryan Jim Ronk, then I guess that atmosphere was similar and he had already been there and, yeah.
John Kubie: No, it was, you know, that was a basic reference to part of what we were thinking about and talking about.
Andrea Hiott: And so how did it progress? Because I do, I mean, I want to mention place cells were the first and that was basically, um, I mean, we can, what can we think of it as like how do we describe a place cell? It kind of, a cell that's representing space in a way. Can we say that in the hippocampus? Yeah. But then tell
John Kubie: the blood interpretation, it tells the animal where it is.
It's, um, can be described as self localization. Okay. We are animal. Yeah. And second to that what can I [00:36:00] do when I'm here that I can't do when I'm over there?
Andrea Hiott: Right.
John Kubie: What opportunities do I have here that I don't have over there? Or maybe over there are opportunities I wanna get to. Right. So, that gets to navigation.
How do I get from here to there, where the opportunities are different than they are here.
Andrea Hiott: And this is where it gets a bit tricky, at least for me, because it's not that the animal needs to stop and think, this is where I am. It's happening immediately.
I mean, in a way, it's the body and the environment and this is happening. There's there's no gaps where the everything stops, it's ongoing all the time. It's the way the animal has from day one of its birth been in its environment, fitted to match to, Busaki might say, um, its environment, but that's not the only cell, right?
So then when did the head direction cell come? Can you tell me about that?
John Kubie: One thing before that. Which is, um, we'll call it remapping.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, that's the thing
John Kubie: that really came out of the 3 hatred experiments was not [00:37:00] only were there place cells in the 3 environments.
But a single neuron could have a place cell in the AR maze, a place cell in the operant chamber. And by the way, these three devices were all in the same position in the room, and they were constructed so the animal could see a lot of the room from the operant chamber. The radial AR maze is flat, so you can see the room easily, but the other two are, you know, modest walls, so the animal could see lots of rounding.
Um, so the, they're really physically in the same place in the room. And yet, the An individual neuron would have placed cells in different apparatuses that were really different. The location was never the same within the room frame. And in
Andrea Hiott: And for someone who doesn't understand, are you recording the same cell in all these Yes.
Yes. Different spaces?
John Kubie: And the same cell is
Andrea Hiott: showing different firing patterns?
John Kubie: One cell might have a firing property in one arm of the radial manes. The same cell [00:38:00] might fire adjacent to the bar in the operant chamber and the same cell might never fire in the home vacate. That was one of the things we found was some cells just were off in one or two of the apparatuses and good place cells in the other.
Andrea Hiott: That's an important part too. That was the
John Kubie: first finding of what eventually came to be remapping. These are first findings.
Andrea Hiott: So did that tell you the importance of context and environment? I mean,
John Kubie: sure. Yeah. Yeah. Because we know the idea that the hippocampus was important for context, as far as I know, date back to Richard Hirsch, who wrote a paper on hippocampus met there was just memory in context.
And then 8 or so years later, they Dell and Wilner revisited that and tried to interpret it in terms of the hippocampus of cognitive map. Didn't really go very deep. It didn't get close to remapping, but they did [00:39:00] try to see how this fits with the. Spatial firing of neurons, and then we,
Andrea Hiott: yeah,
John Kubie: so, and so in, in the pseudo papers that Tim and I wrote, we were, we defaulted context.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, so you are already using that term later. I know you used it a lot, but I was, yeah, we'll get to it. But. I want to hear about the head direction cells, but I also wonder if you had started studying the hippocampus and thinking, like, did you go and look at all the stuff of Penfield and H. M.
and Brenda Milner? I mean, were you aware of that whole literature and everything?
John Kubie: A couple of things there. Um, so now, you know, we have, there's O'Keeffe's idea or the hippocampus is a spatial system in rats. There's HM and Brendan Milner in hippocampus is important for episodic memory. How do these fit together?
Is it the same organ doing two different things? Is it, is the human [00:40:00] hippocampus nothing like the rat hippocampus? Is it, you know, or is there a way you can tie these things together? So that's become sort of the Holy Grail. The field. Can we get these things to merge? And there's some ideas from the early on about how place and memory overlap and how they may be related.
And more recently, they've begun to crystallize a little better, but it's still, those are 2 very big different things. And the 3rd thing was in the early 70s, long term potentiation was discovered. So you have HM and learning, episodic memory. And then the ongoing question, well, how do, how does the brain store memories? You know, what, how can it store, what is it, what is information? How is it stored? Okay. And there were various theories, and probably the most important discovery was this thing called long term potentiation, where they were able to show that if you stimulated an input pattern [00:41:00] to a neuron in the right way, the synapse could change its strength.
And the idea that synapses are not rigid, fixed things. They can wake, strengthen, and weaken, and that can be the engine for storing or losing memory. So called synaptic efficacy.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and you had this Donald Hebb, um,
John Kubie: Right, and Hebb, there's something called the Hebb Neuron. Donald Hebb was a psychologist who talked about how simple rules for strengthening or weakening synapses would explain memory in some fashion.
And then, Lomo and Bliss demonstrated this LTP, which seemed to fit with Hebb's idea.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and that idea generalized, not quite in the right way, but the way people might recognize it is neurons that fire together, wire together. Yes. And this was kind of an actual, real thing. experiment that showed [00:42:00] something deeper than that in a way but demonstrating that.
John Kubie: Thank you. And so what I wrote that blog post, you were talking about the there's nothing about LTP or how memories would be stored, but they talk about HM and learning and stuff like that. They don't, and I asked Melina, did you, Consider that. Oh, yeah. Um, this was down the hall. We knew all about, but they didn't.
It's interesting that it wasn't it's not in the book. We said a little surprise. And so I think I guess some
Andrea Hiott: edits had to be made,
John Kubie: So these are the 3 big, you know, big areas of work that, hippocampus. And can you make any consolidation, which brings these 3 things together and get to unify?
function of how the hippocampus does its job. And so we have, we
Andrea Hiott: know the hippocampus matters for things like memory. And we know that the hippocampus matters for place. We don't, I mean, we're [00:43:00] learning how those might be very much connected. We're going to get to that, but back in, at this time, it was still very new that this area of the brain had anything to do with navigation.
Now there's been a Nobel Prize awarded for that. But then this was a new beginning. You were at the, in the middle of it. So how does it like, how do you remember it kind of growing, becoming, moving at that time? Because place cells was just the beginning.
There were a whole family of, or a zoo as I think, Tim Behrens calls it, of other cells, in this what, in the Nobel Prize, they call a GPS or a sat nav of the brain. How do you remember this time period and the other cells?
John Kubie: A little chronologically, and you've asked about head direction cells, so now's about the time for head direction cells.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, let's do that.
John Kubie: And um, that's Jim Rohnk, who you're
Andrea Hiott: working
John Kubie: with, who's given, who gave you the three behavior
Andrea Hiott: tasks.
John Kubie: Right. So he, as I remember, and I was beginning to work with Bob Muller, we'll bring him into the story soon. Another
Andrea Hiott: person that's important in this whole story. [00:44:00] And
John Kubie: Steve Fox, who's a very important person, and we can talk about that a little bit.
Um, so I remember Jim coming over and said, You guys will all work in hippocampus. I'm going to work in retro hippocampal areas. See what's there. And so he was just putting electrodes down, subiculum and post subiculum in different places and seeing, and um, seeing if anything interesting popped up.
And he got to the post subiculum, which is ambiguous, and also the dorsal pre subiculum, and you know, it's adjacent to the hippocampal formation. Also adjacent to anteroinal cortex and found neurons that had very clear boilers. So the whole job here that O'Keefe and Ron were doing was putting electrodes down and just letting the animal behave and saying, does the cell tell you anything?
Does it tell you a story? And the issue of signal to noise is very important because I mean, [00:45:00] you know, you could well imagine the cell go pop, and then it would get to near a piece of food in my. increase its firing rate a little bit. And you say, well, that's a food cell, but that's not what we're looking.
You know, you want, if you're looking at the single, one cell at a time, you want a really robust correlate and the plate cells are very robust. Head direction cells put place else to shame. They, um, they're astounding.
Andrea Hiott: Can you tell us about those? The title of them tells us a little something, head direction, and you're talking about a
John Kubie: GPS.
People were somewhat confused by it early on. So it, again, the same basic idea, the rat's got an electrode in its brain, and in its post aviculum hippocampus, and recording and listening to the firing of single cells. And I said, Jim was looking in a few areas. And most of them were sort of confusing or not very obvious, but this area of the post subiculum dorsal post subiculum, [00:46:00] he found neurons, and the neuron would fire like a compass.
That is, one neuron would fire whenever the rat's nose was pointed, say, northeast. Another east and somewhat random, but each neuron had its preferred compass like firing direction, wherever the animal is in a pretty big apparatus. It was still Northeast. It was absolutely not place had nothing to do with it.
It was head direction, totally independent of place. And as I said, the signal choice was through the room. These cells might fire 80 spikes a second, which is almost as fast, almost beyond hearing individual pops within a narrow range of maybe 80 degrees head angle, you know, and then any other directions, silent.
Andrea Hiott: How did you figure out it was the head? Angle
John Kubie: because he just watched it. Oh he watched it and then he picked up the animal and pointed its head different directions
Andrea Hiott: and then, and [00:47:00] it just, it was incredible. Incredible. Yeah. It must have been quite a moment. The
John Kubie: place sells. The animals pretty much have to be locomoting.
Yeah. That direction tells no. You can just pick them up and point their nose and you can lift their head up and not much difference. But side to side is the important variable. And um,
Andrea Hiott: do you remember when he found this?
John Kubie: Yeah. I mean,
Andrea Hiott: was it exciting or was it like, ah, maybe this is something
John Kubie: He says, imagine he's like a
Andrea Hiott: eureka moments of everyone running on
John Kubie: a Sunday and no one was in the lab in his story.
He went to a party that night with friends, none of whom were scientists and he tried to explain it to them and, um, no, not, that sounds fun, but I do remember very clearly Was he, Jim built a very long, maybe 30 or 40 foot recording cable and this, our recording rooms were sort of small closet like room, [00:48:00] a little bigger than a closet, but one adjacent to another and a big common lab space.
So, 1 question was, what happened if you move the animal really an appreciable distance from to 1 of these recording rooms to another, when the animal had never been in before as far as we know. , and as I said, you can just carry them in get the basic phenomenon. And so he carried, he built this long cable and found a nice head direction cell in, in it, familiar room and knew, I forgot the direction reference, but saw that carried the rat in it, cell into, and the rats by the way are, you know, they're really fan.
You know, they'll, you get to know them very well and they don't mind being carried and they'll snip, you know, through your buddies. We
Andrea Hiott: love the rats. We owe a lot to the rats.
John Kubie: Yes. So in the adjacent room what I am sure is our memories are not identical, but I'm right. The cell, this lay cell initially was very quiet.
And after a minute or two, [00:49:00] began to fire a couple of spikes. And after maybe two minutes became robust again with the same heading direction. So, you know, a question you can ask is how did the animal maintain It sends a direction going from one room to another. That's an interesting question.
Basically, we need to get that. You have to sort of carry the animal carefully so that it doesn't get disoriented.
Andrea Hiott: I see.
John Kubie: Keeps a sense of direction from 1 place to another if you just put it in the box and it would get lost. But by the way, it's not 100 percent compass direction in an environment like, you know, if you, um, move the wall cues.
all the head direction cells will rotate. So it's not as if it's magnetic sense, always Northeast in terms of pure Northeast, it's,
Andrea Hiott: okay. That's important. It's not a compass in the sense of actual,
John Kubie: yeah. And that was shown in the first papers that very beautifully, you could rotate the [00:50:00] environment, the animals.
And if you did a sort of secret lease of the animal. it's not aware you're doing that, you'll fool the place cells, head direction system. It's very beautiful. And it's not compass.
Andrea Hiott: How would you explain that in if you put it beside remapping of place cells?
John Kubie: Yeah, so, um, the idea of remapping of place cells fundamentally is if you have a whole set of place cells and you go to a new environment, they scramble with respect to each other.
That's what a remap is. It's not with respect to the outside, it will effectively be with respect to the outside world, but really the map is the place cells with respect. So if two cells have overlapping fields in one environment, they won't, you know, the chance that they will in the second environment.
The head direction cells do not remap. They can re, they can change their, globally change, they can get fooled. But two head direction cells with say neighboring directionality, they'll always have that neighboring directionality. The whole [00:51:00] system is coherent wherever the animal is. Wow. I just have to
Andrea Hiott: pause for a minute and say, this is really amazing, right?
It's amazing that this is how the body works. I should also say for those who don't know. I don't know that this was only in rats at the time, but now we do know that the human hippocampus, which is different from a rat hippocampus, but nonetheless, um, does have these. It's been shown with experiments.
And so we can say that the human also has this system. Yeah. Some of the best data comes
John Kubie: from bats. Some of the best data comes from bats, wonderful stuff. Coming from bats when you're flying and how they navigate and stuff like that, didn't you? Yeah, and bats. Bats aren't necessarily the and more and more mice but bats are really fantastic.
Andrea Hiott: Bats are fantastic. I, we could go on. Um, but there's something that seems like there's something missing that we haven't talked about. Um, especially when you're talking about the remapping of the play cells, like how do they know how to do this? And [00:52:00] so what else is in the GPS, that might help us understand this system a little bit?
John Kubie: So there are two other cell types that have been, um, looked at carefully. So one gets a lot of attention, or the bridge cells, Discovered in by the Moser Group in Trondheim, Norway.
Andrea Hiott: And actually the Mosers are no key for the ones who won the Nobel Prize, but
John Kubie: Right, right. And so, I hope now people understand what place cells are like.
So a place, an individual place cell will have one, maybe two, spots in an environment where it fires. Grid cells also fire in locations in the environment, but a typical grid cell will fire in Many locations, but what's amazing is that these aren't just randomly related to each other. They lay out almost perfectly in a grid like pattern.[00:53:00]
Hexagonal lattice.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
John Kubie: I'll show
Andrea Hiott: a picture of it because it's so beautiful. The play cell, we, I'll show it, but there's, as you were describing it, you have the space and then kind of, if you're going to just draw on where, or make dots, let's say where the neuron fires, it'll be kind of one blob in that whole space.
But then when you look at the grid cells, it's really like a beautiful kind of, um, honeycomb ish metric, right?
John Kubie: It turns out you have to use a pretty big apparatus to see these multiple regions, but once you see them, it's just fantastic. Is it true you reviewed
Andrea Hiott: one of the early Moser papers about that?
John Kubie: Not about that.
Andrea Hiott: They were
John Kubie: trying to record place cells in a water maze.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, okay. It would be a challenging task.
John Kubie: Oh,
Andrea Hiott: with Richard Morris, yeah. Okay. I won't go down that.
John Kubie: Rabbit hole. That's
Andrea Hiott: another interesting thing.
John Kubie: And
Andrea Hiott: so what do grid cells do in this GPS,
John Kubie: which I don't, we don't really know.
I mean yeah. a lot of ideas, [00:54:00] but these cells all interconnect with each other. The grid cells are not in the hippocampus, they're in the adjacent region. Interal cortex, a region that has inner connections both ways with the hippocampal region and the head direction cells are in another adjacent region of this postum with interconnections, principally with the grid cells more than with the place cells.
Um, so in another cell type of these called border vector cells that tells the fire with relationship to two obstacles walls, certain distance from the wall. And so these are like, um thicker toys, you can think about ways that you can put together in either. reinforce each other. You know, one early idea when was the plate cells were downstream from grid cells.
If you add a few grid cells together, you get a plate cell. Well, it's not that simple. But they do interact and you play with one group and it affects the other group. And I don't know that there's any simple answers. Everyone's still
Andrea Hiott: trying to figure it out, but obviously there's something [00:55:00] beautiful happening here.
We have cells firing for borders. We have cells fine for head direction. We have cells doing some kind of weird matrix of the, wherever it is metric, um, and then we have, the first, the place cell, which is firing in a kind of, in a particular place to, to generalize it in a way.
So when did you start talking about spatial firing? Because I want to move a little bit into your work with Bob Mueller and the stuff that you developed.
John Kubie: Yeah. SoBob Muellother was a little older. He was a faculty member at. Downstate working in other stuff, and he had a very interesting background, both in psychophysics.
He was really, you know, hardwired, you know, hard science, scientist, and he also had a background in psychology, in, in soft side of psychology up, up in Canada, working with Case Case Vanderbilt, not at McGill, but at the institution. Um, and, um, he Had
Andrea Hiott: he studied with O'Keefe somewhere or something? No. No.
They
John Kubie: Were they friends? I [00:56:00] mean, they knew each other actually from indirectly from college. As we talked to you about how Mindy Dale and Bob Muller were classmates in high school. Yeah, they were
Andrea Hiott: sitting in front of each other.
John Kubie: Behind each other or something. Guy was in high school. Yeah, right.
Andrea Hiott: At the
John Kubie: elite high school in New
Andrea Hiott: York.
John Kubie: And then Muller went on to City College. And a couple of years later, O'Keefe went to City College.
Andrea Hiott: Ah, okay. So Mueller was just a bit ahead of him.
John Kubie: And so they um, both, I think the guys, they both had this mentor, this guy named Phil Ziegler. I think that's the right, and Ziegler. Yeah, I've
Andrea Hiott: seen that, Ziegler.
John Kubie: So, told O'Keefe, you should be more like this guy Muller who was ahead of you, he was, he's really good. Oh,
Andrea Hiott: really? Wow.
John Kubie: And so, I don't know. So he did hear his
Andrea Hiott: name early on. That's funny. So
John Kubie: it's funny how the New York connection overlaps for all. It's funny
Andrea Hiott: what a small world it kind of seems like when you look back at it.
Everyone's bumping around each other there. And I want to take just a pause because, again, I talk about McGill and UCL all the time [00:57:00] for good reason, but downstate too, right? So. All of you, it was Ronk, it was you, and Mule ended up there, right?
John Kubie: Right. So, and then we, after the fact, we called hippocampal group or something like that.
It was a wonderful atmosphere. So, one of the things I think Jim brought to the Placeville group, you know, to O'Keeffe, was he really came from physiology. He was a, he had been studying Impedance in the brain, the most boring kind of thing imaginable, you know, how, you know, just how resistant to the brain changes when you put the electrode in different positions and somehow jump to recording, hippocampal neurons and baby.
I've asked him a thousand times. I sort of understand that. The jump, but it's not completely clear to me. Let's pause
Andrea Hiott: just a minute here because this is important, I think. This is kind of different communities, isn't it? The physiology and this, because you're about to start developing a lot of technology and sometimes I feel like maybe that's part of it too, that this side of it doesn't get talked about a lot because it's a little bit of a different [00:58:00] perspective on things, even though It's part of the whole evolution?
I mean, in the kind of more psychological. So what is it, what is going on here with the physiology?
John Kubie: So let me, so this is my looking back on it. I think, you know, the, the McGill group, you know, O'Keefe and Nadel, they really, You know, do in doing great physiological stuff, but they came were asking psychological type questions.
And, um, Jim rock came from a physiology department, the University of Washington physiology and Michigan and physiology at downstate came from a deep physiological orientation. So, 1 of the things he began to do with Steve Fox was say, okay, what cells in the hippocampus are these places. Yeah. So are they, we, there are lots of people know that a lot of different cell types in the hippocampus.
And they pretty much established that they were the primal cells of CA1 and CA3, that the other cells, the whole categories of [00:59:00] interneurons were what they call theta cells. These were cells that increased their firing rate when the animal was, principally when the animal's walking in the theta rhythm, in the theta state.
With this data cells firing a lot, was critical to getting the place cells, behaviors place cells. So, they in that sense began to put the hippocampus into a physiological context.
Andrea Hiott: So for someone who has no idea what physiology means, it's more like, how are you, how would you, instead of
John Kubie: the brain is a tissue of the body.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. Not so
John Kubie: much as a psychological organism. It's not So you're really looking at
Andrea Hiott: cells and actual Yeah.
John Kubie: How the neurons, you know, what their like, what their membrane potentials are. Right. All the characteristic of the cells of the brain. Without paying direct attention to the psychological or higher level functions.
Right.
Andrea Hiott: So it's really two ways of approaching it. And strangely, it overlaps in terms of findings, but it can get lost or confused or seem like people are saying different things sometimes without [01:00:00] understanding those different approaches, at least in my experience.
John Kubie: I think politically, this was sort of important also because Jim came from physiology and when O'Keefe was claiming these things.
The physiologists, I think, feel we're saying, Oh, what are psychologists doing recording from the brain? They don't know what the hell they're doing.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I can, I mean, I can imagine if you're coming from a certain perspective, it seems strange.
John Kubie: And I know that, I mean, I could pinpoint a few of them. And O'Keefe, you know, had big resistance.
from major figures at the time. And most of these were physiologists, people doing the hard, you know, the difficult electrophysiology with huge racks of equipment and things like that. Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: I think that's important to even imagine that world. I was going to ask you, like, what does it look like in the lab and stuff?
Because It is a real orientation and reference and it's a real world, right? And if you're not in it, it's, I think, hard to imagine how all consuming it can be the way you can kind of see the world through it. I don't know.
John Kubie: Yeah. I remember myself [01:01:00] going into say Jim's lab, which wasn't this big. Hyper fancy lab, but there were racks of recording equipment and I said, my gosh, I have to learn what each of these things does.
And you know, I thought that's what you wanted.
Andrea Hiott: That's why you went there. You are also. Yeah.
John Kubie: But and the, this was a fairly simpler set, you know, there's some systems with four or five racks of stacks of equipment and the idea that you can just understand what the signal processing, this is before computers were playing over and computers, you had to really
Andrea Hiott: understand it.
John Kubie: Right. Computers were just beginning to play a role in neurophysiology. So these, some of these labs were on the forefront of bringing computers into the labs. Um, that's, O'Keefe was not, for example, and the McGill group was not, but the physiologists were. And I think big computer machines, pretty expensive stuff by research standards.
Um, so it was a different, um, different school. That says a lot about the
Andrea Hiott: different [01:02:00] mindset already right there.
John Kubie: Com computing.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, Jim, with his
John Kubie: very open style and having, you know, also being a little older than o O'Keeffe and na nadel.
Andrea Hiott: And
John Kubie: being from the physiology community, I think helped warmed some things up and helped make entries into the physiologic physiology world.
I do remember, when I was a postdoc, we would begin to record place cells. Visiting neuroscientists would come by physiologists and they'd come. And they'd come, and they'd watch me recording a place cell, and they'd say, oh my gosh, you know, that was, you know, They flipped. You know, they would see what we were talking about before they yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Because you can't imagine until you've seen it, I think at least not back then. Can you, could you compare it to anything today that's
John Kubie: so one, one big impact was functional imaging.
Andrea Hiott: Okay.
John Kubie: And, um, that start roughly in the early 1990s and, um, so as I alluded to earlier, cognitive neuroscience is really pretty new and it's expanded a lot. [01:03:00] In your time, I observed the fields and one of the things that made it expand was thing. It was O'Keefe and the Mosers and recording plates out in the middle of the brain, but you shouldn't go if you want to figure things out.
And yet something popped out the classical. Neurophysiologist said, no, crazy to put electrodes there, you know, work and work from the periphery and figure out step by step but lo and behold, interesting stuff came out.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. That's an interesting point too, that was also the prevailing sort of philosophy of the time, right?
Start at the edge. Don't go in the middle.
John Kubie: Right. Actually, the Mosers say that very nicely in their Nobel Prize speech about Oh, do they?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I haven't read that, but that's probably where I got it from.
John Kubie: Ha. Um, and we felt that as well, you know, that the famous studies were, um, how the visual system going from the retina to the lateral tracheal to visual cortex.
Step by step. And that's how you should proceed Layers the signal gets changed and [01:04:00] extracted. And for the motor system, the inverse of that. And, but putting the electrode in the middle of the brain and seeing anything you can interpret. People would say, well, it's like recording from a single transistor in a computer, you're not going to learn anything.
It's not going to tell you anything. But, maybe it did, well, and it, you know, people were lucky and it did.
Andrea Hiott: I think it definitely has.
John Kubie: So, it wasn't guaranteed to work.
Andrea Hiott: No.
John Kubie: That's kind of the beauty of this,
Andrea Hiott: too, is a little bit of an accident, in a way.
John Kubie: Because people still say single cells are the wrong way to think about it.
Yep, I think in terms of networks, recording tens of thousands of cells and don't even get a hint of an idea from single cells. The argument is ongoing.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and I would say they're both wrong. I mean, they're both important. but let's, I want to talk a little bit about your work with Bob Mueller.
So what did you guys start doing? You're spatial firing, you're developing new technologies.
John Kubie: So as Mueller came in, wanted to work with us and he, you know, he had. He knew about the [01:05:00] placehold stuff. He knew about O'Keeffe and Nadel. He was, he somewhat friendly with O'Keeffe and Nadel and all that kind of thing.
And so he just, to me, let's collaborate. And the rough idea, and I can't even pinpoint how the strategies worked out. It was between Jim Ronk and Muller and I, and me, um, between us, among us, whatever the grammar is, anyway was to simplify Um, I Definitely to have some camera based recording system for tracking the animal in the, in a very simple apparatus.
And the apparatus was a cylindrical enclosure with very simple sensory cues. We put a white cue, a big white ball. It's pretty simple. cardboard along one wall, about 90 degrees of the wall.
Andrea Hiott: And
John Kubie: the animals, we just wanted to cover the apparatus without interfering with the animal behavior much without going in and poking the animal.
So we trained the rats to expect food pellets [01:06:00] to drop randomly on the floor. Initially, I was throwing them over the curtain and walking around the curtain. It was curtain by the way, finally had curtains and closing things. And but later we had an automatic dispenser that was scattering pills. But, um, to the rat, pretty happy welcoming you.
And it will do it, eat for 15 or 20 minutes before it wants to drink. So that was roughly the length of the sessions.
Andrea Hiott: And the camera, yeah, what was,
John Kubie: and so it required a computer and this was,
Andrea Hiott: Is this the first entry of the computer into this process, other than a video? Yeah,
John Kubie: in terms of, you know, in parallel, McNaughton and O'Keefe were computerizing also, almost exactly in parallel.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, that's also very interesting. But from your perspective, what was happening? So why did you want to do this? What advantage was it going to give you?
John Kubie: Oh, lots of advantages. One, Was the, you know, a key description wasn't overly convincing
Andrea Hiott: people
John Kubie: [01:07:00] thought it's subjective. He's telling you where it's, you know, it's just making these little circles on the floor.
Yeah. And to this
Andrea Hiott: idea that you were saying one cell and so on, I mean,
John Kubie: yeah, so we went to Take ourselves out of the, you know, system of collecting data and demonstrating the data, but also we could, you know, it's a much more refined, potentially more refined way of describing what's going on.
So they're doing this. Could you
Andrea Hiott: change the environments? Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
John Kubie: actually, no, I mean, with two papers, we came up initially was just documenting that their plate cells and, um, so you were
Andrea Hiott: able to get a more robust documentation. That this is actually really happening, so
John Kubie: yeah, so we did. I think many of the appropriate controls and so 60 times a second.
The animals position is. Had detected and how many spikes occurred in the target cell and then collecting this in a chain over 15 or so minutes and then putting it together and taking each [01:08:00] pixel, each location and saying, okay, how much time the animal collectively spend there and how many spikes. We're there and getting computed a firing rate for each pixel in the apparatus and then making a map of the firing rates.
And we use the color coding system, which was. Very expensive to publish. So we had this nice color pictures of these bull's eyes or play cells on a yellow back yellow background or pixels that with this rat visited plenty, but there were no spikes. And it was pretty pictures that were pretty convincing.
And so we did this for a number of cells and we could characterize the size of the firing field shapes a little bit. And, um, the distribution that kind of within single apparatus. And the other aspect was then begin to change the environment on the animal and to Before you go
Andrea Hiott: to the environment, I, can I ask a question?
It's kind of asking you to be a little egotistical, but, or not [01:09:00] really, but do you think this played a role in solidifying the people were going to accept, yeah, place cells are real or this I hope so. Yeah. I think so. We were alone. A lot of people say that this work with Mueller and this is important, but I'm not sure that how to make it really obvious, but I think one way, I obvious to people who haven't read all the papers, but one way is that it did show that it's legitimate.
Is that fair?
John Kubie: I think so. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And
John Kubie: so let me summarize the second study, which was going to different environments. We are, we really demonstrated the remap. We didn't use the word remapping yet, but we showed the remapping the cells individual or pairs of cells would go to independent locations and some would turn off in some environments and environments we use for cylinders and boxes and double sized boxes and double sized cylinders, which was real interesting because some of the cells in the double sized one would just expand.[01:10:00]
It would show some, and others would just remap or change. So that was a partial effect, but the expansion was very interesting. And, um, Doug told us something about. The nature of what, you know, what, and what's going on here. And then we all Do you
Andrea Hiott: remember what your feelings were at that time?
Were you, was it exciting or was it
John Kubie: Oh, it's exciting. Were
Andrea Hiott: you trying to piece together a larger puzzle, or was it more exciting from the technological advances? Well, it took us
John Kubie: years to collect all this, all the sounds. So it wasn't Yeah, it's such a long process. It wasn't, you know, an aha kind of moment.
It wasn't Eureka. And I can't remember the, um, stages. But, one of the, you know, reading back on those papers, you know, and we knew where at the time, but also reading back, we had some insights which we carried forward. One was we, one manipulation we did was to put barriers, little, in the environment
Andrea Hiott: and we
John Kubie: found that if you put a barrier in what had previously been a [01:11:00] place field, it would disappear.
But it wouldn't affect the rest of the apparatus. You put the barrier somewhere else and it wouldn't have an effect.
Andrea Hiott: Sorry. Oh yeah. So it would, okay. So that's another. Environment, remapping,
John Kubie: and so we, our conclusion, or tentative conclusion was that it was the barrier ness. The barrier could also be transparent.
It was whether the animal could walk through it or not. That it was the behavioral space that was available that we thought was, you know, a lot of the importance of what was coming in. That the, in a more common term, maybe wouldn't say, the affordances.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. That the
John Kubie: environment presented. What behaviors are possible here and what paths I can take, what paths I can't take.
Can't go through that wall. I can't go through that barrier. Um, that kind of thing. So we didn't know the word affordances, but we phrasing that sort of said that kind of. So. This is interesting.
Andrea Hiott: Maybe we can start to go into some kind of, [01:12:00] I don't know, just like explore some territory a bit here and some bigger ideas, um, a little bit, because this makes me think about, so this is.
Very behavior oriented or the biology the biological process, related to how the animal is moving through a space and It makes sense that if it can't continue forward that the physiology would change I mean, it just kind of seems to make sense. But let me ask like just a big question. Do you think?
Memory is that kind of behavior too if we think about like Tolman and the cognitive map And the idea of just the rat, let's not think about our understanding of memory and thought yet, but just the mat, the rat in the maze, and the idea that it has a kind of cognitive map, which is a kind of knowledge.
Which is a kind of memory, or is it not? I mean, it's not episodic memory, it is? I'm trying to get to, um, if you see any connection here.
John Kubie: Yeah, so I would, [01:13:00] my rough notion is definitely memory, but not memory in a simple episodic sense. There are sort of two layers. One layer would be the substrate or the background upon which episodes can take place.
So if you have an environment. See an environment covered with play cells, it permits certain paths to take place with the paths being roughly equivalent to the episodes, but the context of the environment are upon which the episodes rest. You could not have these episodes without a background, and that's sort of a fundamental, I think that's in contrast with Ike and Al's.
Rough idea that it's all associations. And this is what might be called a two layer approach, a background layer, and then a episodic layer. Okay, let's
Andrea Hiott: try to unpack that a little because, um, for some reason I'm thinking [01:14:00] of golf. I mean, now that's kind of going to humans, because I think you wrote something very interesting about, um, golf courses, there was a article in the New York times way back about how people who play golf have like better memory, but it's like subject to better memory of the golfing experience, if I remember correctly.
And I believe you said, I think the article said it was for one reason, which I don't know what, maybe it was just that people who play golf have better memories, um, because of the action, but you were kind of relating it to this method of loci of the space itself being important.
John Kubie: I only vaguely remember the golf
Andrea Hiott: story, but I
John Kubie: agree with the rough idea
Andrea Hiott: that if
John Kubie: you
Andrea Hiott: have
John Kubie: a very clear substrate, you that really rock solid.
Andrea Hiott: Huh.
John Kubie: That the memories within that space are, you know, I think of, you know, people who can play bridge and recall a bridge hand.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, [01:15:00]
John Kubie: I tried a little bit. I can remember a couple of them, but people who really do a lot of, you know, chess game, they can reconstruct the chess game entirely. Part of it is by chunking and things, but the context of the, Experience the chess game.
I guess it's a chess board and the affordances of all the pieces or something like that.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
John Kubie: Um, and I think that once you have a really rock solid background, then the stuff that lays upon that is much easier to extract.
Andrea Hiott: Here's
John Kubie: a similar thing about wine. It's wine specialist who could identify. the field of origin of grapes of wines he was tasting, and it sounded impossible, you know, that globally, he could tell you was some field in Australia, or something like, and he was interviewed, lovely sounding.
It's not as hard as that. It's really not that hard. First, I say, oh, this has got to be an Australian one. There's no question about that. [01:16:00] And then from there, I can make I can narrow it down. And so it's a two layered approach. And I think that many of these things have this solid background foundation upon which a specialist memory can be laid.
Andrea Hiott: How much does that have to do with experience? I mean, if I'm, if we're talking about the rat and that's born, if we think about its whole development, it encounters a really particular It's a kind of, well does it, let me ask. If these rats are born, are they born into the situation of the experiment such that basically they only know these kinds of environments so that, yeah.
John Kubie: Both, two major lab groups, the O'Keefe's and the Moser's have looked into this. Mostly the Moser's I think of trying to look at, you know, glazed cells, head direction cells, bridge cells, which come first, what experiences are critical for one emerging or the other. And it's not that clear story. It's technically very challenging [01:17:00] things.
And so one of the things is technically to record from the brain to these very small animals. Um, and the second thing is to manipulate the environment in interesting ways that they don't have, say, These rectangular boxes that they are going up in, there's some, it's somewhat different and it's not all that clear.
It, I think the rough thing that I would remember from them, apologies to them if I'm wrong, is that roughly head direction cells seem to roughly precede the other two categories. And second, it's kind of like a
Andrea Hiott: tuning mechanism then or something. Yeah,
John Kubie: I think that there's some, you know, there's a. You know, people talk about hardwired and not, somehow the whole notion I find a little wrong.
Hardwired
Andrea Hiott: is a rough term.
John Kubie: Yeah. I mean, because everything's dependent on some experiential state. And we're all developed in different ways. Here's what I'm
Andrea Hiott: trying to get at though. How important, how fundamental is place to memory and how fundamental are the [01:18:00] patterns that you develop in place, you know, to, like if you put that barrier up.
Yeah. Needing to find a way around. I don't know.
John Kubie: My bias is that the place, so there are two rough ideas. One is that place is not fundamental, it's just easier to see. That you could have any low dimensional framework equally good. Is that more
Andrea Hiott: Eichenbaum or it's more, it's a matter of relation?
It doesn't matter? No.
John Kubie: Eichenbaum wouldn't even be that. He would say, there's no, low dimensionality is not really relevant.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. But
John Kubie: it's something like that. There's no background set and foreground set. Right. But these people would say there is a background set, but space is not really special. It's just easy to record, and O'Keeffe and us, we were lucky to be able to see that so readily.
I think that's not true in, in, in two ways. One is, place jumps out all the time. This place sells. Want to see it or not, you can put the animals in tasks that are not very special, spatial, and the space things jump out anyway. The second thing [01:19:00] is, I think, there's not much data here, but I think from an evolutionary perspective, and my guess, this is mostly guesswork, is that the hippocampal system in say, in snakes, or in reptiles, back to snakes, um, was fundamentally a navigational system.
It didn't do these other things. It didn't have to do with episodic memory. And when increasing demands were put on the system, well, could you help us with this test, with that test, then the spatial framework got reused in different ways. And so this is a complicated story to put forward what the hippocampus is doing in mammals and humans, how it relates to memory and episodic memory and how it relates to navigation.
There's no Proof for simple stories here, but I do think that place and spatial navigate then that, um, location specific firing it. Anyway, what can I do in this spot in something about navigation are, um, substrate if they're foundational [01:20:00] and then other things build upon that.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, so I guess what I'm trying to get you to say I don't know if you even think it is that place is fundamental to memory. And then I wonder, is memory also fundamental to place? Like, I feel like in a way, from our position as humans, these are, seem different,
John Kubie: but are they? So, um, jumping back in evolutionary time, think of some reptilian or reptilian like ancestor, who, um, comes out into the world.
Now, the world is not preformed. There's no way that the features of the good places and bad places would be hard, hardwired into the Right, so what we're The creature is not coming on
Andrea Hiott: into the place with the little map in its head of the place, because this doesn't work, yeah.
John Kubie: Yeah, so to make use of the Of this machinery that knows about places, it has to learn about places.
And so [01:21:00] that, you know, that's as much of an argument as I can make it. There's no, it's not, you know, all the snakes or whatever aren't born into the same. area, in which case they could have inherited some map. That just is not realistic. But they
Andrea Hiott: are born and they immediately must navigate and make way and in that environment.
So they're forming those.
John Kubie: Navigation is not all map, like, you know, cognitive map, like, there are various effective ways to navigate. And I'm not even sure, um, the degree which humans use maps, I mean, humans are not very, many humans are not very good with maps and having an aerial view of where you are doesn't always help you get from here to there.
Right, and I
Andrea Hiott: think sometimes we confuse map and territory that even when we talk about a cognitive map, it doesn't really mean, it doesn't mean we're pulling out a little map inside our brain. I mean, this is the homunculus argument. So it does get kind of confusing and we won't get into the weeds there, but [01:22:00] I wonder if you agree with this, like if that snake or what, that's creature, amphibian, Is born into its environment and it immediately has to navigate it, make its way through it.
And this is obviously creating some kind of alignment with the body and the space. In the same way that the rats learn, you know, if we think of Tolman, the route to the reward. Um, that's learning I guess, right? That's learning. Does that then set forth a kind of pattern? Um, Well, there are
John Kubie: various ways you can optimize navigation.
And I think one not easy way technique, it's not so easy to understand, but really used by animals is path integration.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
John Kubie: And, um, so this has been beautifully studied in desert ants.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, really?
John Kubie: Oh, yeah. So
Andrea Hiott: you need to write that down.
John Kubie: Oh, yeah. Wait. Wiener is, I'll send you the name of the principal value [01:23:00] for the papers.
So imagine an investor day, it has a home base and it's wandering out to look for food and it takes a zigzag path. Looking, foraging through its environment. Now it finds food. These ants can go meters and meters across sand, no information from the substrate, and after they find food, they can take a direct path back to home.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, amazing.
John Kubie: That's not a cognitive map. And what's been shown, what they effectively do, it's for each, Leg of the outbound bound journey. Think of each leg as a vector, straight line from one spot to another.
.
Add up all of those X vectors. If it were Cartesian and XY coordinates, you just add up the Xs and add up the Y.
Okay? So you have an outbound vector and then you just invert it and make it all negative, and you have a vector that points directly back to where you [01:24:00] started mathematically. It's beautiful. Now the world. And the ants do it. It's astounding. So what the ant has to do is keep track of two things. How far it goes on each vector and each leg has to count steps.
That's called odometry. And it's got to keep track of its head direction. And so each vector is a mix of distance and direction. It keeps, you can think of it as XY coordinates, but they almost certainly are not doing that. That's the way we can think of it. So those are the vectors.
Andrea Hiott: That's how we can model it.
John Kubie: Inverted. And you go right back. And the rat, the ant are incredible. It's been shown that they have this directional sensitivity and that they count steps. The counting step method in ants was to make stilts on their legs. And so that they miscounted, or they took those stumps off, and they miscount the other direction.
Um, it's really beautiful work. But that is a rough summary of one kind of path integration, which is how you get back home. But path integration can also work [01:25:00] connecting to locations within a familiar environment. And so path integration is one, it's not white map like. It's got features of distance and direction, which are real spatial features.
But that One method animals can and I think we have to assume that animals exploit all kinds of functional methods for navigation.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It doesn't, it's not either or.
John Kubie: And so the, or only one, even the gold standard, like the water mae the water mae standard is can an animal take a novel route?
And they can take a direct path to an unmarked goal. So in the water maze experiment, the animals explore the water. They have multiple trials where they swim around blindly and find the platform, which is a way to get out of the water.
Andrea Hiott: And
John Kubie: for multiple trials, you can introduce them from a new start location, and they can take a direct [01:26:00] path to the platform, which gets them out of the water.
So that has, you know, as you pointed out earlier, it's become sort of these. The robust standard technique to demonstrate some high level navigational ability. Exactly the strategies the animals are using, whether it's really map like, or path integration, whatever, it's a little unclear to me, but it is.
An efficient and effective strategy and one that's pretty easy to reproduce. It's very difficult to record plate cells in those environments, which the most the most were discovered. So it's not a great environment for physiology, it's very good for behavior.
Andrea Hiott: Well, let me just put something out there that you probably, maybe you're going to totally disagree with, but it'll, I'll use it to see how you think about this.
Um, yeah. Okay. What if we, the ants, of course, they have, they come into the world with certain bodies and they're aligning to their environment. It's a certain pattern. So in a way, the dead [01:27:00] reckoning or the path integration, the body itself is providing something like what head direction is providing.
John Kubie: It's well, it's now pretty well worked out in some, um, insects, what the directional system is. Okay. That they have a head direction system
Andrea Hiott: with
John Kubie: respect to the polarizing cue of the sun, but they have a directional, the neuron, the neuronal mechanism is very similar to head direction. But it's not,
Andrea Hiott: I guess what I'm saying is we don't have to necessarily think of it as they have a GPS.
They're not like pulling out a little map in their brain, but they are the GPS. They are the GPS. They are the dead reckoning system. They are the path integration. I mean, could this be just happening? Like you said affordance almost in a, an evolved Gibsonian way. I don't mean vision,
John Kubie: but I don't know that they had to learn anything.
They do have to keep a running tally of the vectors. That's all they need. But that could just be
Andrea Hiott: happening with the [01:28:00] body, but, here's the question. We talked about
John Kubie: consciousness. There's no reason I would say that they have to be conscious of what's going on.
Andrea Hiott: But couldn't that be, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, if we think of that's just happening.
It's hard for us not to imagine they're having a little map in their head and they're aware of themselves. But actually, they're just, as we do, as babies do, you come into the environment, you must navigate, you must find a way. Your body itself becomes your GPS system, not just the brain that you're pulling out a little map, but couldn't that, could that be continuous in the sense, like when we learn something like language.
And probably other animals have languages, but I'll talk about human language, that then becomes, um, a way that we've communicated with the world and come back to ourselves so that same kind of alignment or navigation through something like language, we might use in a very continuous way that, um, to plan or to do something similar, to navigate spaces that aren't necessarily geographical.
I know that's kind of a [01:29:00] big thing, but it feels to me continuous if we think about Because I'm not
John Kubie: really sure what you're getting. I think I have a little sense of what you mean by continuous. Do you mean It's the same
Andrea Hiott: kind of process.
John Kubie: It's navigating. I'm thinking continuous. It's distinct from a deliberate, deliberation.
Andrea Hiott: No. I don't mean it like that. I just mean,
John Kubie: so, so walking is sort of a continuous process. We don't have to pay a lot of attention. Once we start walking, we can have a conversation with a friend and that kind of thing and know what to do.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
John Kubie: The kind of thing you're thinking of?
Andrea Hiott: Well, no, but that's actually very interesting.
That I would be more, I think more of like a rhythm. Um, I guess what I mean by continuous in a, I mean in a really everyday sense, not in a neuroscience sense. I mean just that whatever this body is doing, like the ant, the rat, or us, when it is born, it must Navigate, make way through it's an envir it's environment.
There's not like some separate thing that then becomes planning and, all the [01:30:00] stuff we associate with language and image. For me it seems like you're constantly kind of learning this stuff and that, so for example, like the little rat, right? When it's in the maze and you put one of those barriers in front of it, it seems natural to me that, It would, um, use its same patterns of navigation to, I mean, in a cartoonish way, stop and, um, play out those scenarios that it's already been in because the body would have developed a way that it can continue to replay those events, um, without it.
needing to be some completely new thing that suddenly evolved, you know? For me, it feels like part of the same process.
John Kubie: So, um, I'm going to circle back to a word you didn't like, deliberation
Andrea Hiott: okay.
John Kubie: But, um.
Andrea Hiott: No, I do like that word, but. Okay, so, I mean,
John Kubie: in this context, you didn't seem to like it. Yeah. Um, so in, [01:31:00] in mammalian, in invertebrate brains, in mammalian brains, there are sort of two memory systems.
So one is this episodic memory system, but let's just say it's involved with deliberation, put it aside for a moment. And the other memory system we can think of as basal ganglia, where it's involved with learning skills.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
John Kubie: And learning turn. fairly automatic responses to stimuli. And these automatic responses can be generalized.
So they could be elicited in a somewhat novel situation where your old strategies might just work. And there, you know, it's a little bit like Kahneman's thinking fast and thinking slow. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. But
John Kubie: that's how I think of it is fairly spontaneous things that come out without. effort, you know, the least resistant kind of response in situation X.
And if it matches one of your well known responses, maybe overlearn then just go with it, [01:32:00] that kind of thing. Is this like
Andrea Hiott: motor? like we need the motor cortex to learn, but once we've learned the action, we don't necessarily need the motor cortex anymore. It's like a pattern generator in the body or the spine or whatever.
John Kubie: That's certainly true in rats and I'm not 100 percent sure how true that is in primates and humans, but yeah, that's a little bit like that
Andrea Hiott: where
John Kubie: the basal ganglia can, you know, without A lot of thought, if you want to put it that way, generate perhaps a useful response. And yeah, deliberation is a good word without
Andrea Hiott: deliberation.
Yeah,
John Kubie: these can be, um, very smooth and very efficient. It can be better than deliberative choices. They're faster, you know, if you can really learn the response. Well, you think of a trained athlete, a tennis player or something, they're not thinking about all the components of the stroke. It's all just.
Andrea Hiott: But they did at some point.
That's kind of the thing.
John Kubie: Right. So they, I don't, I'm not sure that's what you're getting at, but I mean,
Andrea Hiott: um, it's one term that people use. Yeah.
John Kubie: [01:33:00] Is flow something that.
Andrea Hiott: Flow? Yeah. I think that's all connected, but let me ground it back with the memory and the navigation kind of thing that we talked about where those seem different.
And reconciling them is kind of you know, what everyone's doing now, but can't quite see clearly. Um, I guess I'm trying to relate it to that in a way, if we think about knowledge, um, our conscious experience of our own experience, like, I don't mean being conscious or aware, but I mean be, deliberative, becoming able to think of ourselves as a subject, and consider our actions or something like this.
Um, all of that to me feels like the same kind of process that We're, we've been uncovering with something like navigation. It doesn't feel like those are in a Descartesian or dualistic way, like separate things. And I know that's getting a little philosophical, but. I wonder how you see it.
John Kubie: Yeah, I think, you know, [01:34:00] what you're saying.
Um, so I, the experiment I'm thinking of that's closest to these lines is from Pfeiffer and Foster. Are you familiar with that? I think so.
Andrea Hiott: Is that the one where the, um, rats are, is it a rat one?
John Kubie: Yeah, rat one. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: And where you, they are kind of deliberate, you kind of. That's the idea. Yeah.
John Kubie: So, so the, so I'll try to simplify, you know, the description, the animal.
A signal comes to the animals, now you've got to find the buried food, and it's in a somewhat unusual location, and where the animal is at that moment in time, is unpredictable to the animal. So the animal hears the signal, but now he has to find the buried food, it has to find, yeah, um, and, um, What the animal does is it rears.
It doesn't move.
Andrea Hiott: It rears, so it's kind of stopping. Right. On its two hind legs.
John Kubie: It exhibits these things called sharp waves, which [01:35:00] are fairly slow potentials. And riding on the sharp wave is a very rapid sequence of motion. Of action potentials and gets tokis work of action potentials seems to be imagined paths the animal could take from that location.
So now, wow. These, according to this rough notion, the animal arrears.
,
John Kubie: one sharp wave occurs that imagines one path. Another occurs, it's another path, a third occurs, that's a third path, and then the animal says, that second path takes me to where I want to be, the goal, and it executes something like that second path.
So that fits really nicely, if it's really true it's, there's some issues with the, how pure the experiment is, if it's really true, it fits into what we think about deliberation.
Andrea Hiott: And it's not the only experiment that shows something like that, so I mean, there's been quite a few and different.
Different ways. [01:36:00] But, um, yeah, and it's very exciting. I find that very exciting. And
John Kubie: the other fit into memory is consolidation during sleep.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, yeah. So it's something similar than this replay
John Kubie: simply simple. Again, we have the sharp waves. And, um, it's well known. This is un uncontroversial. That sleep consolidates memories.
These are just behavioral studies and very sort that if you learn something during the day, sleep on it. It's better. It's remembered better even better than right after the learning episode. Sleep on it. So the notion is that it the memory, the episode replays during sleep. Actually, the notion is. It's selective consolidation, the one, the important things replay, the unimportant things fade. There are a lot of experiences the animal would have had before going to sleep. And that
Andrea Hiott: probably has something to do with the affordances, like, that it wants to remember. I mean, I think of [01:37:00] the bees for some reason, and the dance.
John Kubie: Well, there's a paper that came out just this week that the ones that replay the most are the epistate trajectories that are associated with rewards.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, really? You have to send me that paper. I don't know that.
John Kubie: It's at Ibizaki's group.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, it is? Okay. Wonderful. Then I will find it.
John Kubie: And so it's not just everything that happened gets consolidated, but there's a selection.
They both are replayed while the animals awake, um, during the task and then turn to sleep if I remember correctly. So that's the second thing that brings the place of phenomena into the memory world.
Andrea Hiott: This is very exciting. I want to, for some reason, bring up the idea of planning and prediction and, we were talking about this GPS of the brain and. I think when I was talking to Len in my, the talk I haven't actually put on yet because we've had a few talks, but we talked a little bit about, um, how, [01:38:00] what they were noticing in this system, and I wonder if it's what you were noticing too was, There's a kind of planning or a kind of, um, I guess what people would think of now as predictive processing or active inference or all these words that are very, you know, hot at the moment.
Um, I just wondered, did you see something like that too, when you,
John Kubie: in your I don't think so. I mean, I'm using most of the other people's experiments, but I like them a lot. Let me just. Go a little further. So, deliberation. So, there's something going back at least 100 years, which is roughly called the two stage model of decision making.
Andrea Hiott: Okay.
John Kubie: And it's roughly what we just described, but it's not in rats. It's about how it's Kahneman's thinking slow, but the idea really dates back at least to William James and others, which is that when you have a difficult, you know, problem, you imagine various solutions, [01:39:00] various strategies you could do, and you select one to act on.
So stage one is playing out various what if scenarios, and stage two is choosing one for action.
Andrea Hiott: Isn't that like taking taking Like after you've taken certain paths, you start to, the body starts to, the GPS starts to understand certain patterns, doesn't it? So, at some point maybe you can begin to deliberate about those patterns based on all this experience.
John Kubie: Yes. So you, in generating these imagined paths, you have to be Have a lot of familiarity and some creativity in the past need not be ones you've ever taken in the ability to construct paths across space, taking roots. You haven't explored before would take a system that really understands the layout of the environment or a two dimensional or three dimensional space.
That's not purely spatial. It could be a social network, but it probably [01:40:00] has to be what's called low dimensionality. Um, something like space to be able to construct roots. Possible routes across this space. Um, yeah I'm very enamored of that two stage model. Um, I think the philosopher, one of the philosophers really came across it late in life and suddenly came to the idea of the determinism isn't real because.
This is how the, how we make decisions, um,
Andrea Hiott: because there's,
John Kubie: because we played out these scenarios. I don't know quite how it defeats determinism, but it undermines it. It's not just SR responses. Well,
Andrea Hiott: here's how I think it does is if we can reflect on our own patterns, that means I think we only do it. I mean, I don't think any creature that was just isolated would ever do this, but I do think through this process of navigating the world, and I'm going to get a little metaphorical.
We do learn how to, um, reflect, [01:41:00] deliberate on all these paths that we've taken before. And then we can, as you were saying, kind of choose new ones. That doesn't mean that we can create. paths beyond, completely beyond our comprehension, but we can just the same way we can path integrate or do all these other things, put things together in a new way or something.
So for me, it does show that, it can show that there's at least some space of free will, or that there is some purpose maybe even to being, becoming aware of ourselves.
John Kubie: I can see the arguments against, Paths you that are presented, they're determined. You can get into knots about that. But one thing I think that people, which is cool about imagining the future, is, you know, our behavior is not totally determined by our past.
We can, in fact, imagine the future with some accuracy. Machines don't do that. You know, the deterministic framework, it's all the [01:42:00] past determining the next step. But the fact that our brains can make reasonable, realistic guesses about the future. Possible futures really takes it out of the loop. And I, you know, that I'm not sure that gets to that, you know, I don't want to really get into the determinism issue, but I think it's very important that we can imagine the future that our sense of ourselves has a past and a future and those are, you know, really critical aspects of sense of self, all these sorts of things.
Things we haven't talked about.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole either, especially because it would take forever. But I have to just say too, I do think it has to do with the paths that we open up for each other and that there's a kind of, there is definitely a way in which there's some degree of freedom in that.
Um, but that would be a whole other discussion. Yeah,
John Kubie: so the example I gave you about imagining paths, that's not a socially constructed set of paths. It's the animal doing it itself. So I don't really agree. And that's [01:43:00] from what I can gather that all these imagined paths have to be collectively determined over that.
Andrea Hiott: But the, I'm not sure if, I mean, okay, there's different degrees of it, I guess. So I guess I mean on a kind of human where we are now level, then in terms of like the future of where we're going to go, for me, it would be a matter of, um, combined Or sort of not group thinking, but the communication offers a lot more possible affordance for something like changing the trajectory we're currently on.
The RAT, I think you've set those paths and it's either going to take one or the other. And maybe it's, I do think that's a kind of free will that it has in a sense that it can decide which one to take. Um, I guess I'm just, that's one sort of scale and on, on a wider scale, I would say, yeah, it's. I would just make a
John Kubie: distinction between deliberation and collective [01:44:00] deliberation.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. How do you see that?
John Kubie: Reflective is when you talk to your friend and you share ideas and you get a, you know, a better set of alternatives than you would have on your own.
Andrea Hiott: So, I mean, here's a kind of a leap, but, um, thinking about memory and navigation and, um, sense of self identity. I mean, memory is a kind of our identity and our sense of self and so on.
But for humans, we think of that as being conscious. I mean, the rat is conscious, obviously, but it's not. conscious of itself. Maybe it is. I don't know. But so there's all these kind of levels of becoming aware and all this reflection and deliberation. And I just wonder how you, how what's your kind of take on that?
I mean, do you see a continuity between, for example that rat deliberating about which path to take and, um, what now we're all so as humans, um, obsessed with this idea of consciousness and. I see.
John Kubie: Continuity. Yeah, you [01:45:00] do. I mean, I could say, okay, I've got to get to the cafeteria. What's the best path to take?
I could take the elevator, take this, that deliberation of the sort. I, you know, I could just head out and go, or I could think about the routes and what I could do along the way. And that's, you know, not much different than the rats. Um, and then let's expand it all very broadly. So, um, I have career goals.
Andrea Hiott: How do I get
John Kubie: there? I have career goals. Not anywhere near getting there. So I have an idea about my life and what each project is. And I want to get to some end point. And there are deliberative choices. I put off some immediate gratification, maybe to get to a future Goal standard. I think it's, you know, I don't see any discontinuities.
I think it's a continuum from how to get to the cafeteria to how to, you know, get to some family goals, how to contribute to society, how to do things that make, you know, that fit my sense of self, my self worth, those sorts of things. [01:46:00] Um, um, I think that there's no, you know, I don't see a discontinuity, but I don't think that animals have the same discontinuity.
extended, you know, I think there's a whole range of stop points for different animals.
Andrea Hiott: Well, they have different bodies and they're in different contexts.
John Kubie: They know they can decide, they know they can, you know, those are all interesting issues they all probably do and, you know, listen to things.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I won't go off on my feelings about that, but I do, let's go back to the hippocampus for a second because , so the hippocampus is what is it doing with all this stuff? I mean, it's sending it to neocortex, right? So, um, can we relate that to what we're talking about?
I mean, can we try to bridge this? Let me see if I
John Kubie: can do it quickly.
Andrea Hiott: Okay.
John Kubie: Here's another theory of hippocampus, which I like, which is that it's an index.
Andrea Hiott: Oh yeah, the index.
John Kubie: And so let's take something like an episodic memory. I, you know, have a memory of what it was like having breakfast in [01:47:00] my kitchen when I was a kid.
There's a lot of stuff in it. There are colors and people and, you know, the shape of the room and the smell and all these sorts of things.
Andrea Hiott: And for someone who doesn't know what an episodic memory is, we can think of it like a movie It's a memory of an
John Kubie: episode, sort of a movie like thing. They can sort of, you know, envision what it was like, you know, it's kind of Which is
Andrea Hiott: different from, like, for example, another kind of memory, like
John Kubie: A memory Associative
Andrea Hiott: memory or, yeah.
Yeah. It's not a memory. Riding a bike or something.
John Kubie: Right. No it's, you know, it's like a flashback in a movie, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's kind of an episode, like an episode in a book. So um, now I don't think all those things are stored in the hippocampus, but the hippocampus, well, the hippocampus, they don't have that memory.
So those, what's going on? So the rough notion is the hippocampus has a set of pointers, which project out to the neocortex. And the neocortex. The memory is fleshed out by where the pointers point in the [01:48:00] neocortex. So it's not the hippocampus. The hippocampus stores the connectivity, what goes together, but the content, the richness is neocortex, and probably the essential things that make it conscious is probably neocortex and thalamus interacting, not the hippocampus.
Um, so I, yeah, tons of
Andrea Hiott: papers on what neocortex does and yeah, but it is kind of the newest part of the brain that does, we do, most people do see that as associated with this human experience of something like thinking and thought and so on. The only
John Kubie: thing, to add to the, So, the index theory is usually, um, what's the fellow's name?
I can't come up, late, back to, name's not coming to me, but it's sort of a static index. It's like a card, library card catalog that tells you where to go to find the stuff. One thing I'd add to that, it has a temporal, as a time ordered property, which we think of these [01:49:00] episodes as having, A movie like, a temporal sequence, and
Andrea Hiott: I think what
John Kubie: this stuff coming out of the hippocampus is, like the sequence of placeholder firing, there's a time order that comes out.
So the hippocampus Yeah, it almost can seem like a script
Andrea Hiott: or something, can't it?
John Kubie: Even these cognitive
Andrea Hiott: maps, they're not static, they're almost more like scripts that are constantly sort of
John Kubie: going It's like a conductor in music.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, okay. Music the music and the
John Kubie: conductor You know, is the hippocampus, and then it comes out, the orchestra is in the neocortex.
Andrea Hiott: Right, so you have this environment that has this kind of statistical regularity that we could call music, let's just say, and the conductor is sort of turning that into something that will become like an episode, what we experience as an episode. Could we say that? I mean, we're generalizing, exploring.
That's condensed,
John Kubie: you know, a lot of ideas into a couple of minutes, but I wasn't sure we could do that.
Andrea Hiott: So then we could almost say [01:50:00] that the function of our own awareness of our own memory is thought our experience of what we call thought, which is usually language or image related. That could be functional in the same way that, um, the hippocampus is functional for navigating a geographical environment.
We might be navigating other statistical regularities like conversations or books or linguistic conceptual spaces in a similar way, could we say that?
John Kubie: So, you know, getting back to this two stage deliberation. you know, some of the trajectories you reject might be very dangerous and you reject them because I may fall off that cliff or something like that.
So yeah, that's got implicit functionality in that, you know, survival value, if you will.
Andrea Hiott: Do you ever think about patterns? Um, I mean, do you think more about parts [01:51:00] like the neurons or do you ever think in, in, in bigger patterns? Like I was thinking about the golf course and how it's, , It's such a pattern that no matter what golf course you go, there are certain regularities, or and how that makes it easier to remember, or music, when we hear a certain kind of music that seems to stimulate or enhance memory, I think you've heard that before.
You've written about that. So that's kind of, but do you see some connection between this pattern or recognition or regularity of some kind? And I
John Kubie: think that's one of the big problems. I mean, issues is so roughly we had this remapping idea, which separates one set of memories from another one. But how do you, if you want to fuse two maps, if that's necessary for sort of creative thinking, how can that work?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
John Kubie: Where, you know, it's actually easier to construct a system which makes lots of totally separate learning systems that don't overlap. But how do you take advantage of them being [01:52:00] separate, but sometimes they can learn from each other? And that, I have no real answer to, or idea about, I think that's a big challenge.
Andrea Hiott: Let's wind it down because we've been talking a long time, I guess. You know, you're still at downstate. That's what I want to get to. So tell me, like, why didn't you leave?
Or is it, has it been as stimulating through all these years? The
John Kubie: Hippocampal group is just wonderful. It's Jim Ronk is retired and is somewhat debilitated. Bob Mueller unfortunately died. Others. Andre Fenton was a graduate student going through here, then a young faculty member, but he's left.
So the group that is not very functional right now. Um, I also do a lot of teaching and I get, and that's been at least half my life and now it's more than half of my life. Um, I enjoy it a lot. Um, it informs my thinking. Also, I think it makes me more of a generalist to try to. It's, you know, more about neuroscience than just hippocampus in place [01:53:00] else.
So I enjoy that. I enjoy a lot of working with the students and the other faculty. I wish, you know, I certainly would like it if the hippocampal group reconstituted. More. And I do collaborate with Andre Fenton at NYU. I have collaborations with people outside of downstate, but unfortunately not that much is going on here.
Well, you and
Andrea Hiott: Fenton did a lot together, too. Last kind of last question, I guess, is, um, well, actually, I was wondering, is your How did you get into kind of philosophy ideas, mostly through your daughter, or do you still think about that?
Is that part of your life?
John Kubie: Yeah, it's a pretty big part of me. I think it was about 15 years ago. Um, I went into teaching. I got graduate students together and I said, well, we're neuroscientists. A big topic is consciousness. Shouldn't we learn something about consciousness and have some idea?
And, um, at that point Christophe Koch's book, what's the name of his book again, um?
Andrea Hiott: I don't know. I can't remember. Conscious. I'll find it [01:54:00] later. But yeah, Christophe Koch's book.
John Kubie: So it was the, you know, then most promising current book on, and we'd read it. It was back when
Andrea Hiott: nobody was allowed to talk about consciousness, I think, and kind of shattered that.
John Kubie: And started out. with a definition of consciousness from John Searle, which is consciousness is what you have in the morning when you wake up and you lose at night when you go to sleep. And I said to the group, we can do better than that. So, we started so that I think got me started with that aspect of philosophy.
Um, another thing was, um, Pat Churchland has been a wonderful Influence and I've known her from maybe 15 again, some maybe 15 years or 20 years. Um, I had a memory that seems to be a false memory. Then the beginning of her book, she talked about navigation and moving to space, the fundamental thing. That animals do.
And I looked back and I can't find it, and I've asked her about it, but I early on read her very [01:55:00] famous book, neuro Philosophy from what, 1990
.
And that was very inspirational. Um, and I was very pleased after that to get to know her. And, you know, I know you know her also.
.
Um, and so, I can't put a stamp on what got me started in thinking about it, but does it motivate
Andrea Hiott: you still?
The teaching is one motivation. Are you also motivated? Oh
John Kubie: yeah. No, I've got this long manuscript kind of thing of trying to tie a lot of these ideas together. Um, hopefully it'll see the light of day someday, but
Andrea Hiott: The start when you were really interested in trying to understand who you are and emotion and so on, do you think you've Have you gotten any, have you gotten?
Yeah, I kept ideas
John Kubie: about emotion and they fit in with this broader thing about consciousness. It would take me a while to lay that out.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, maybe another time, but I just wonder if it's, if if you found some answers or what, how that's progressed, but you, it sounds like you have.
John Kubie: Well, I don't know if answers, they get the field, neuroscientific [01:56:00] emotion is difficult field. I mean, the people, they seem to come together about 10 or 15 years ago, and now they spread apart again. It's like a consensus, but it's not there.
Andrea Hiott: I
John Kubie: have some ideas that as an outsider, which I am.
Andrea Hiott: Well, I hope you publish them or put them somewhere, um, that we can read.
And also I hope you continue to document the downstate times. I know you've done a lot of interviews with Jim Runk and I'll link to those and stuff. Yeah,
John Kubie: we have a long, Andre Fenton and I did an over an hour interview with Jim a couple of years ago that was really helpful. Also, you apparently read some of my blog posts and that was a period of life that I really enjoyed.
Andrea Hiott: They're actually really interesting. I'm going to link to them because
John Kubie: But I'm going to start up again. I've got a whole list of topics that I never quite get
Andrea Hiott: to. Oh, good. Because you're, I mean, at some point I was looking at your blog, I think that was a few years ago, and it doesn't seem up yet, but I hope you put it back up.
John Kubie: Oh, it's there, I think, but it's not. The core, oh, I couldn't get it, but. [01:57:00] But, um. Anyway, I'm going to let you go now, because you need to, one interesting thing about the blog, you can't. Okay. Um, so there were two blogs. There was a personal blog, which just got me going. And then, um, I was part of a group sponsored by the Society of Neuroscience bloggers.
Andrea Hiott: Brain Facts.
John Kubie: Yeah, but that doesn't go on anymore. They don't, they stopped it. What was interesting about that was I asked what, you know, what am I supposed to do? What do you want? And they said, well make these posts, um, sort of where they advanced high school or college student interested in neuroscience could understand them.
And that was a challenge
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
John Kubie: To make it interesting. Not dumbed down, but understand sort of what a little bit what you're doing. , when I wrote my own, when I was sort of t fellow neuroscientist, I wasn't making. Giving much background. But to the Brain Facts blog, I found it was a fun challenge to try to make it, you know, to introduce it in a way That a bright college student could be interested in follow along.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I find it very, [01:58:00] it feels light, but you actually learn a lot. And cause you relate it to things like a New York Times story or Memento, the movie or golf or, you know, and I think that, yeah, you kind of sneak in the learning in a way. So it's good. I just want to say thanks. It's great. As you know, I think that this time period It's really important and I think we're learning something about the relation of mind and environment and the body from it all that is a very big deal.
So on, on that level too, I say thanks for all the work you've all done and I wish you the best. Thank you for inviting
John Kubie: me. It's been fun. I hope it made some sense.
Andrea Hiott: It was wonderful. Um, is there anything you wanted to say that, you know, before we go that I haven't asked or I know we've been talking about
John Kubie: it in the movie ending, which is hi mom.
Andrea Hiott: That's perfect. Let's leave it there.
John Kubie: No, nothing to say.
Andrea Hiott: All right. Now stop recording.
Memory and Navigation: Hippocampus History from the NYC perspective